Mercedes invited Dan and I on a 500 kilometer road trip through France and Spain, in one
of their brand new 2018 Mercedes G-Classes.
The Mercedes vehicles are pretty impressive, especially if you're into the luxury off-roading
market.
The G-Class is exceptional.
The thing I'm most excited about is the 3 locking differentials – not just one or
two, but three.
Lucky for us, Mercedes is letting us take these off-road in some pretty extreme conditions,
so we'll see how they hold up.
[Dan] We're literally on a cliff right now.
[Zack] Let's get started.
[Intro]
[Music playing]
[Zack] Obviously we've already done some pretty heavy driving in this, but I'm going to run
you through the exterior.
So this is pretty much the same design as the previous Mercedes G-Classes, except for
they've managed to shave a hundred and seventy kilograms off of the total weight, which is
pretty sweet.
It still has the same iconic markers on the side, which, side note, is actually pretty
cool.
If this ever hits a pedestrian, this whole thing will collapse inside the frame, not
damaging the light, and more importantly, not damaging the pedestrian.
Same iconic grille with Mercedes logo and the same relative boxy shape that the normal
G-Classes have always had for the last 30 years.
One thing Mercedes has bragged about is the same style of door handles they've always
had with the push button on the side.
And the spare tire on the rear.
And it comes in two different styles.
This is the G 500, and there's also a G 63, and I'll talk about those more in a bit.
So inside of the back, you can tell we've been driving for a minute, we have the same
opening style handles right here.
And inside the car, these seats actually fold completely flat.
So we can lift these up, set these down, and there's a lot of room for activities back
here.
The thing I'm most excited about though, is the triple locking differentials.
Not only one in the rear, but there's also one in the front and one in the middle, and
I'll explain what I mean.
So every car has something called a differential that's in between the two tires that lets
them spin independently of each other.
My truck, my Toyota Tacoma, has a rear locker, which means that it can lock the differential
and make the tires spin together at the same time.
Which helps you get out of sticky situations.
Let's say you're in a patch of mud and one tire is spinning, the other tire won't move
while that tire is spinning.
So with a locker, it makes it so that both tires have to move at the same time, which
means that if this one is spinning, it transfers the power to the one that's not spinning and
also makes it move.
So in this G-Class undercarriage right here, we have the front of the car, and here we
have the rear differential with the locker, which is pretty standard on off-road cars.
But we also have a center locking differential here, which means that the front and rear
tires won't spin independently of each other.
They will all have to spin at the same speed at the same time.
And then this G-Class also has a front differential with a locker.
Basically with all of those lockers you'll just never get stuck in a G-Class.
But rather than just talk about the locking differentials, how about we show you how they
work.
So inside the G-Class we have a plethora of buttons - these control the seats over here.
We have two big monitors which I'll talk about in a second.
But right now we're going to talk about these dynamic select programs.
Here we have, obviously, you're basic slippery individual comfort Sport and Sport Plus modes.
But, if we jump down here into the differentials, and we put on the center lock, then it brings
us the different kind of trail modes.
So we have the regular trail mode, and then we also have a rock mode.
And then we have the sand mode here.
And each one of those...the tires act differently depending on what mode it's set to.
And also, if you check right here as I'm moving this steering wheel, you can see the angle
of the front tire as I turn the steering wheel back and forth.
So most of the cars I've driven have the exhaust coming out the back, and it sounds, you know,
like a normal car, normal truck.
But here in this Mercedes G-Class, the exhaust sounds completely different.
And first of all, it comes out the side right next to the back passenger rear tire.
And secondly, it sounds more like a Harley-Davidson motorcycle than anything else.
So right now we have the G-Class 500 and we're going to take it off-roading up into these
mountains behind me.
This one...it doesn't have the side rails, and it doesn't have those tail pipes that
stick out the side.
So the sound of this 500 is quite a bit different than the 63 that we were in before.
But this one is better for off-roading because it has that additional ground clearance.
It's time to see how it handles for real though.
So even though we're going uphill right now, and I can't see the road directly underneath
me, we have the camera here which can see the road directly underneath me and it can
see over the crest of the hill.
Which to my eyes, looking over the bonnet or looking over the hood, I can't see over
the hill.
So it's nice to have these additional cameras.
So one thing that I've noticed, taking this G-Class off-road...remember, this is the 500,
is that it is super super quiet when I'm driving.
The only thing you can hear is the sound of the engine as it's revving.
There's no wind noise, there's no nothing else.
And that's because the cab of the vehicle is air tight...like it's water tight.
You can feel it when the doors are slammed, you can feel the pressure of the car.
So right now we're going over this muddy terrain area in front of us, and there's a huge puddle
up ahead.
And it's kind of crazy because the water level... as we get deeper, the water level is going
to come up to the doors and the doors should stay water tight.
So we're going to go through the water.
Looking out through the door right here, you can see how deep...you can see how deep it
is coming up to the doors.
And there's zero water getting inside of the cab.
It's insane.
So a) it's water tight, and b) all of that water tightness helps keep the noise level
down as well.
[Rock music playing]
Solid day.
A bunch of water cover in the hood.
Yeah, the water level was definitely above that bottom seam at the door.
You can see the dry patches right here and the wetness right down here.
So above this bottom hinge, the whole bottom foot of the door was underwater.
But still nothing got in the car.
That's impressive.
So we've done a lot of the off-road driving.
We've tested the off-road capabilities.
But to be honest with you, with how expensive this is, it's more of like a luxury vehicle,
and so I imagine most of the time it's going to be on road because you don't want to scratch
something that costs this much.
So as far as the on-road driving goes, it feels like a luxury vehicle still, and one
of the things that comes with luxury vehicles is performance and speed.
Even driving at freeway speeds, it still has a lot of acceleration left over to get even
farther past legal speed limits.
But with that, Mercedes has put a lot of effort into making the vehicle more quiet.
The G-Class is not an aerodynamic by any means.
It is a box and has the aerodynamics of a box.
And while that's great for keeping the same style from the last 30 years of the G-Class,
it's not so great for wind noise.
But since this thing is pressurized and waterproof, it does keep a lot of that exterior noise
out including the road noise and cars next to you.
So as far as the interior goes on the G-Class, this is another 500 with a white leather interior,
and it looks phenomenal.
Check this out.
So right inside the door here we have the speakers.
We have all the seat controls, like every single aspect of the seat can be controlled
up, down, left and right, back and forward.
And this seat also, this is the leather.
Dan and his son Lincoln chopped up one of the S-Class seats, and this has the same technology
inside of it.
So it has like the massaging air pockets.
And the sides, as you turn the steering wheel back and forth, the sides grip your body with
each turn of the vehicle.
It's pretty sweet.
Plus it has heating and cooling in these seats with these buttons right here.
Normal window buttons and just the white leather everywhere.
Inside the vehicle we have a display right here, as well as a second display over here
on the side.
That's the same kind of thing we saw in the A-Class when me and Dan went to Amsterdam
for the A-Class reveal.
One thing that I'm not super fond of and I've noticed in every single G-Class that I've
been in...I think this is number 6 or 7 in this road trip....is that with the 2018's,
the reflection of this vent right here is in the rear view mirror.
You can see that little circle of the vent in the mirror all the time.
And it's not super distracting, and you might not always notice it, but I have.
There are buttons everywhere on this.
I feel like some of them are a little bit redundant, like down here we have a back button,
right here we have a back button, right here we have a back button.
There's just so many different places to control the electronics inside of the car that wherever
your hand is at that time, you can control basically everything, whether it's down here
at the bottom or up here on the steering wheel.
A couple more buttons up here at the top and a sunroof which I love.
There are 5 billion specs we could talk about, safety is one of them if you want to talk
about that.
So with the seat belts, when you clip them in there's a little motor up top that cinches
it tight across your chest.
I thought that was cool.
My truck doesn't have that.
And then there's also the normal safety features that cars in 2018 have.
So it has the lane assist – it helps you stay between the two lines.
And the thing is, is that it's actually pretty strong.
If the cars thinks that I'm just naturally drifting into another lane, it'll take the
steering wheel and jerk it back into the lane whether it's, you know, a center stripe it'll
do it in like short segments, or if it's a solid stripe like on the edge of the road,
it'll do it hard.
It almost makes you think that you hit something on the side of the road because it jerks you
back into the center.
So I haven't quite decided if I like that feature yet, but it's still interesting that
it's there.
Also, when you're changing lanes and signaling to go in one lane or the other, there's little
LED markers on the side view mirrors that tell you if there's a car in your blind spot,
which is super super helpful.
But there are at least 50 buttons within my grasp right here and a lot of them do the
same thing, like the back button that I pointed out before, there are 3 of those all within
reach of my right hand.
But for those of you already familiar with Mercedes vehicles, these buttons are pretty
standard, and it is good to always have easy access to the buttons you press the most.
Also didn't realize the Mercedes-Benz logo lights up.
That's pretty sweet.
We finally made it to Barcelona after over 500 kilometers of driving from France to Spain.
To be honest with you, before this video, I knew that the G-Class was a little on the
more luxury side of things, but I didn't know that it was as capable off-road as it actually
is.
And super huge thanks to Mercedes for letting me and Dan put that to the test, literally,
today and yesterday.
The fancy seats and the 3 lockers are still my favorite things of the G-Class.
Let me know what you think is best down in the comments.
And thanks a ton for watching.
I'll see you around.